Whistleblower Edward Snowden isn't the only one looking for a safe haven since he began leaking a series of top secret documents on the National Security Agency's surveillance practices. So has Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, whose statements to Congress earlier this year on NSA methods were exposed by Snowden's leaks as being highly misleading. And as many call for Clapper's resignation, he's finally issued a public apology.

In a letter sent to the Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Diane Feinstein and published on the Office of the Director of National Intelligence's website, Clapper admitted that his response in a March hearing to a question from Senator Ron Wyden on NSA data collection was "clearly erroneous."

Wyden had asked Clapper to clarify a statement by NSA Director Keith Alexander, who had denied in a talk at the Defcon hacker conference that the NSA collected "dossiers" on every American. "Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?" Wyden asked.

In his letter to Feinstein sent on June 21 and released Tuesday, Clapper publicly apologized for the first time since the NSA scandal arose, and argued that he had confused two different types of NSA activities: The domestic data collection allowed under Section 215 of the Patriot Act and the foreign surveillance allowed by Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. (FISA)

I have thought long and hard to re-create what went through my mind at the time. In reference to Senator Wyden's reference to "dossiers" and faced with the challenge of trying to give an unclassified answer about our intelligence collection activities, many of which are classified, I simply didn't think of Section 215 of the Patriot Act. Instead my answer addressed collection of the content of communications. I focused instead on Section 702 of FISA, because we had just been through a year-long campaign to seek re-authorization of this provision, and had had many classified discussions about it, including with Senator Wyden. That is why I added a comment about "inadvertent" collection of U.S. person information, because that is what happens under Section702 even though it is targeted at foreigners.

That said, I realized later that Senator Wyden was asking about Section 215 metadata collection, rather than content collection. Thus, my response was clearly erroneous--for which I apologize. While my staff acknowledged the error to Senator Wyden's staff soon after the hearing, I can now correct it because the existence of the metadata collection program has been declassified.

In previous public statements, Clapper had been more hesitant to admit any untruth in his statements to Congress. In an interview on NBC's Today show, he said that he had given the "least untruthful" answer possible, and argued that he defined "collection" of data differently from Wyden, though he admitted that his reliance on an ambiguous semantic distinction was perhaps "too cute by half."

Wyden didn't find the answer cute at all, it seems: Along with Senator Mark Udall, Wyden issued a public statement two days later calling for Clapper to explain his answer in full. Now that he has, it still remains to be seen whether his apology will be accepted, or if Clapper will be become the second federal government employee--after Edward Snowden himself--to be fired as a result of Snowden leaks.

Here's the full letter from the Director of National Intelligence to Feinstein.

I'm a technology, privacy, and information security reporter and most recently the author of the book This Machine Kills Secrets, a chronicle of the history and future of information leaks, from the Pentagon Papers to WikiLeaks and beyond.
I've covered the hacker beat fo...